We are all Mujahadeen now: There is no way that the US support of al Qaeda and the Neocon wet dream is going to stand.

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A poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center showed 70 per cent said they are not in favor of “sending arms to anti-government groups in Syria,” an increase from 65 per cent in December and 63 per cent opposed in March 2012. Meanwhile, the number of those who favor providing military support dropped to 20 per cent in the most recent poll, down from 29 per cent in March of last year.

Does anyone in the international community believe what Benjamin Netanyahu says, or are they only playing a kind of poker where everyone knows that lying is part of the game? And does it even matter?

Does the international community really believe that Netanyahu wants a two state solution?

Netanyahu believes in the 'greater Israel' ideology. In fact, it is the only thing he believes in. On the other hand, he needs to reduce as much as possible Israel's isolation in the international community and not to embarrass too much the few friendly states which Israel still has. If we leave aside Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Palau (they do exist!), the main problem of the Israeli propaganda machine remains the US: the global interests of Washington require restraint from its allies and an appearance of playing according to American stated positions. Concerning Palestine, the positions of Washington and Israel are distant in many aspects.

This is why Benjamin Netanyahu was forced, several years ago, to declare his commitment to a “two states solution”, while everyone knows, and Barak Obama more than anyone, that the Israeli PM and his far-right government have no intention whatsoever to get out of the West Bank.

The last visit of Netanyahu to Poland offers us a fresh example of the difficulties in maintaing a double language. On June 11, the prime minister's office distributed to the media a joint statement by the Polish PM and Benjamin Netanyahu. The statement noted that Israel is interested in immediately and without preconditions renewing negotiations with the Palestinians in order to achieve a historical compromise with the goal of establishing a demilitarized Palestinian state: surprisingly moderate and far removed from the political positions of Netanyahu's government, his party and… his own declared opposition to such a plan. A few days later, Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon declared that the Israeli government does not endorse the two state solution, and that it will oppose any attempt to establish a Palestinian state.

Danny Danon represents the position of Netanyahu’s party, as well as of his far-right government, and the joint statement with the Polish government is in direct contradiction with both, and may provoke a serious domestic crisis. As a result, Netanyahu ordered his office to explain that the statement was drafted by junior staff members of the National Security Council, and that he did not read what was written in his name. “That document was only for the protocol” summarized the Israeli PM.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reaffirmed Israel’s commitment to a negotiated two-state solution after Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) said on Monday that the idea of a Palestinian state within Israel had reached a dead end.

Although Bennett is a senior minister in Netanyahu’s government, he did not hesitate to present an opinion on the conflict that differed from that of the prime minister, including calling on the government to annex Area C of the West Bank.

“The idea that a Palestinian state would be established within the Land of Israel has come to a dead end,” Bennett said in Jerusalem at a public relations conference held by the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian Authority immediately demanded a clarification from Israel.

“These are very dangerous statements made by a minister in the Israeli government, which is continuing to expand settlements and avoid fulfilling its obligations [toward the peace process],” said Nabil Abu Rudaineh, spokesman for the PA presidency in Ramallah.

“Israel has officially declared the death of the two-state solution,” added chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

With friends like former President Bill Clinton and current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, what is a fellow like President Obama to do?

As a start, he could get a few second opinions.

President Obama is struggling to help resolve an ugly civil war in Syria. He is also working to relieve U.S. tensions with Iran, which has just elected Hassan Rohani (above), a moderate, as its new president.

For most observers who are not in Israel's rapidly shrinking circle of friends, the news of Rohani's election is reassuring. The new president won with 50.7 percent of the vote, avoiding a run-off with his closest opponent who had only 16 percent.

Rohani's victory should be good news for easing tensions in the region. What is not so good for Obama is the advice and public shoving he is receiving from his two self-serving friends, Clinton and Netanyahu.

The only cleric in the list of six candidates, Rohani sided with the Iranian students after the Green Party's apparent victory in the 2009 presidential election was rejected by Iran's ruling clerics. He has served in the past as an effective nuclear negotiator for Iran. He has shown that he is not a hard-liner, but a man willing to negotiate.

The Syrian civil war between Syria's government and rebel opposition is the second Middle East crisis currently confronting Obama. Until now, President Obama has refrained from any military involvement in that war. Until, that is, former President Bill Clinton couldn't resist saying, "Do what I did, Mr. President."

Maureen Dowd reports that Clinton, whose wife is almost certain to run for president in 2016, shoved Obama out of his previous cautious stance on military action in Syria.

In a rare act of disloyalty as a member of the club of former presidents, Clinton joined the chorus of war drum-beaters to persuade Obama to supply small arms to the rebel side of the Syrian civil war.

It is of considerable importance to pro-Israel U.S. politicians like Clinton, that anti-Israel Hezbollah forces helped Syrian government forces retake Al-Qusayr, a crucial border city between Lebanon and Syria. If Israel does not want any help to go to its enemy, Hezbollah, then Bill Clinton is with his Israeli friends. There is, after all, money to be raised for Hillary’s race in 2016.

Dowd wrote in her New York Times column that Clinton told Senator John McCain that Obama "should be more forceful on Syria and should not rationalize with opinion polls that reflect Americans' reluctance to tangle in foreign crises."

"Citing his own experiences in Kosovo and Bosnia, Clinton said that if you blamed a poll for a lack of action, 'you'd look like a total wuss.' He added that 'when people are telling you 'no' in these situations, very often what they're doing is flashing a giant yellow light' of caution."

A former president telling a current president from his own party that he must not be a "wuss", is not exactly a supportive suggestion. It is, in fact, downright insulting.

It does not help that Clinton chose to convey his "wuss" message through McCain, the Republican that Obama defeated for president in 2008. (A wuss is, according to one dictionary, "a person who is physically weak and ineffectual. Often a male person with low courage factor.”)

{…}"In sharp remarks directed against his Democratic successor and his wife's former boss, President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama risks looking like a 'wuss,' a 'fool,' and 'lame' for not doing more to influence events in Syria.

"Clinton, speaking with Sen. John McCain Tuesday night in a closed press event sponsored by the McCain Institute, contrasted Obama's inaction in Syria to his own action in the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, which included the bombing of the forces of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic."

For a man who served two terms as president, Clinton knows better than to compare apples to oranges in a sensitive political decision. Kosovo was then, Syria is now. In addition, the political dynamics in 1999 are totally different from those in 2013.

Obama knows the difference far better than his erstwhile presidential pal, which explains why the current President joined the Clinton-McCain war party so reluctantly. He said as much, as Peter Baker reported in The New York Times:

"Coming so late into the conflict, Mr. Obama expressed no confidence it would change the outcome, but privately expressed hope it might buy time to bring about a negotiated settlement."

Obama should find new friends whose wives are not running for president. One place to start is to pay attention to someone like Ramzy Mardini, an adjunct fellow at the Beirut-based Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies, who wrote in The New York Times that even a tentative step toward military involvement in Syria is a "Bad Idea, Mr. President":"Lacking a grand strategy, Mr. Obama has become a victim of rhetorical entrapment over the course of the Arab Spring -- from calling on foreign leaders to leave (with no plan to forcibly remove them) to publicly drawing red lines on the use of chemical weapons, and then being obliged to fulfill the threat.”

Obama would also benefit from reading veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk who, after Obama's announcement of small arms aid, wrote in The Independent:

"The Western powers are dangerously close to flooding Syria with weapons and ammunition which will officially go to the nice rebels -- but will quickly pass to the horrid rebels, who will sell some of them to al-Qa'ida, Iraqi insurgents, Syrian government troops, Malian militiamen, Taliban fighters and Pakistani hitmen. Guns are about money."

We must also assume that by now President Obama has been informed of what, if true, is a dangerous new development, also reported by Fisk, who writes that Iran will send 4,000 troops to assist Syrian government forces.

According to Fisk, the decision to involve Iranian forces in Syrian was made before the Iranian presidential election. Why is this ominous? Iran's entry into the Syrian civil war would place Shia forces against Sunni forces with the U.S. operating on the side of the Sunnis. Fisk writes:

"In years to come, historians will ask how America -- after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 -- could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed.

"The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed's wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor -- a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala -- continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants."

"America's alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan.

"King Abdullah of Jordan -- flooded, like so many neighboring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees -- may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle. Up to 3,000 American 'advisers' are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria 'no-fly zone' -- opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries -- will turn a crisis into a 'hot' war. So much for America's "friends.'"

The reason President Obama needs to stop listening to Benjamin Netanyahu is obvious from Netanyahu's immediate response to the Iranian election result. You can almost hear Netanyahu’s dismissive reaction, "nothing new here."

Netanyahu's comments on the outcome of the election were reported in The Times of Israel:

"Let us not delude ourselves. The international community must not become caught up in wishes and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program. It must be remembered that the Iranian ruler, at the outset, disqualified candidates who did not fit his extremist outlook and from among those whose candidacies he allowed was elected the candidate who was seen as less identified with the regime, who still defines the State of Israel [in an address last year] as 'the great Zionist Satan.'"

This from the leader of a state that spent eight years attacking Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as someone who wanted to "wipe Israel off the map," a phrase which was mistranslated, but used, nevertheless, to demonize Ahmedinejad in western political and media circles.

That false translation was exposed as early as June, 2007, by Juan Cole:

"Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for 'this occupation regime over Jerusalem' to 'vanish from the page of time.' ... It was apparently some Western wire service that mistranslated the phrase as 'wipe Israel off the map,' which sounds rather more violent than calling for regime change."

Here are the headlines from AIPAC in DC of course: Does anyone have the slightest doubt about the lobbying going on regarding Iran and its support for Syria? This entire latest flareup started with Netanyahu attacking the Syrian army base. Everything ratcheted up after that. The irony is that the Syrian government just may win. That is when the neocons went into overdrive and enlisted Clinton to lobby Obama.

Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani said that with his election his country had entered an era of cooperation and would take concrete steps to resolve its nuclear standoff with the West—promises that would require a shift by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Mr. Rohani, in first news conference since his landslide victory in Friday's election, called for Iranian relations with the U.S., which he referred to as an "old wound," to be healed.

The U.S. and allied European and Arab governments responded cautiously to Mr. Rohani's election and statements, saying it was too early to tell whether he could chart an independent policy from the hard-line approach championed by Mr. Khamenei over the past decade.

Although Mr. Rohani isn't a radical reformer, Iranian voters saw him as a break from eight years of conservatism and defiance by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Foreign policy and the economy, linked because of international sanctions over Iran's nuclear program, were top campaign issues.

President Barack Obama, after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Northern Ireland, said Monday that "we both expressed cautious optimism that with a new election there we may be able to move forward on a dialogue that allows us to resolve the problems with Iran's nuclear program."

Certainly Israel believes it in their interest to maintain hegemony or disruption, but before discussing the course of the war which won’t end we should look at the primary reasons we are engulfed in Arabian conflicts.

Oil tops the list. But that reason is dwindling as an energy source though its political clout is as everlasting as the religious conflicts behind the scenes. Or not very far behind. So already there's money, church/mosque, and ego. Ego is the political effect of poor decision making. Greed being the culprit which we see in American business but we're not alone.

Russian oligarchs, Chinese dictators, ayatollahs all have this trait. Specifically we'er involved because of Saudi Arabia. Mujahadeem advance their cause throughout the northern continent. The Sahara is their base camp marginalized by Egypt. They wealth is not shared but despised by Syria a poor nation in all facets except for the willingness of its treacherous leaders to murder its citizenry for money and arms. So it goes. The curtain for war opens and closes but it never seems to end in the Middle East. I think the Islamic code is the devil in the detail. There won't be any change in structure no matter who wins. Dictatorships thrive in Russia and China, and the Mid East. We're there to make Lockheed and Boeing rich and keep certain congressmen and their wives in mansions. Power brokers. That's why we're there.

There are any number of people that could wake up tomorrow morning, and crash the stock market, but the number of people that could Crash the Actual, U.S. Economy is very small. The King of Saudi Arabia is one of them.

After a decade of ground conflict in 2 countries Iraq and Afghanistan, we still haven't learned we can't alter the history of sectarianism, governmental disfunction and human rights violations that pervade the area. We're not alone not learning the lesson. Russia has meddled for a long time and is now gone from the region in Egypt and Syria and only authoritarianism keeps them involved given their own nasty history of defeats in the same region.

What makes McCain and company so eager to get another blood letting and rebuff? The Middle Easte a local problem not our business up close.

>>>>"The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed's wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor -- a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala -- continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants."<<<<

The human race is really really dumb sometimes. Most of the time. Nearly all the time. All the result of not knowing how to read properly. But here is a great schism that might work to our benefit. Surely it is better to have them shooting at each other rather than at us.

As just described in the intelligence hearings, the standard for permitting a query of the database of internal US phone calls is a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of terrorist activity, Inglis says.

Translation: we can do it when we are suspicious and we are able to say we are suspicious.

Plain English translation: since we don't currently have any deaf mutes making these decisions, we can do it any time we want to whomever we want.

I do not. The federal judges on that court are superb. The nation would be proud of what they do.... They have been extremely professional. There is from my perspective no rubber stamp... Every time we work with the court... on each one of those orders that we go to the court, there is tremendous oversight, compliance and work.

Evidently, the reason they fail to deny any of these requests is not that some day they will be accused of allowing a terrorist attack but that in all the thousands of requests issued by all the various HS agencies the facts were so compelling and the reports themselves so well written that the Court had no problem approving.

Remember in the FISA Court there are no challenges to government assertions. It's not an adversarial process. The only thing FISA really looks at (if at all) is whether the government provided 'enough' assertions.

But that is not restricted to the FISA Court. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners at Quantonimo had habeus corpus rights. The government ignored the ruling and law suits began. Subsequent to the SCOTUS ruling, lower courts ruled that many, around sixty as I recall, detainees be released because no charges had been brought against them. The government then appealed to the Appeals Court that covers D.C. (forget which one it is). The result, despite the presumption of 'innocent until proven guilty', the Appeals court reversed most of the decisions and articulated a new standard to be followed by the lower courts in these cases. Now the courts are to presume that whatever the government says is true and the defendants have to prove the government is wrong. Since then, even the number of lawsuits has dropped to a trickle. SCOTUS has since refused to review the Appeals Court ruling. And thus you have the hunger strikes and forced feeding taking place in Guantonimo.

"The director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March that the N.S.A. did not collect records on hundreds of millions of Americans. Since the revelation of the phone log database, he has explained that his testimony was the “least untruthful” statement he could make about a classified program."

The question is too broad. There have been rulings by SCOTUS indicating that it is constitutional for the government to use phone records in certain circumstances but these are limited in scope and subject to prior review by the courts.

If the question actually is "is the government's current practice of collecting metadata using the Patriot Act as their authority" the answer is "Who knows".

1. They cite the laws they are operating under but refuse to release the documents that describe how they 'interpret' those laws, even to the people who have written those laws. Even Sensenbrenner indicated the current practices of the NSA were not encompassed by the intent of the original Patriot Act. Senator Merkley, a lawyer indicated that section 215 provides authority on what you can do with information you have but does not provide any type of authority on the collection of that material which is what the NSA asserts.

2. The actual info we get on these programs is wrapped in lies, misinformation, and the parsing of words. Clapper admits he outright lied to Congress. Alexander parses his words actually saying nothing. All the others in today's hearings misrepresent the truth. How can you trust that they are not actually going outside the law 'as they determine the law' if they feel they need to? How can you trust them when they indicate that even telling you how they interpret the law is 'secret'? How can you trust them when their most constant argument is "Trust us". The Ministries of Love and Truth are alive and well and will soon be housed in that new facility in Utah.

3. Rand Paul is going further and arguing that even the Patriot Act itself violates the Constituion. He is trying to get it reviewed by SCOTUS.

Good luck with that one. In today's hearing, Alexander again repeated what he said in the Judiciary hearing, that the NSA metadata vacuuming program has 'helped' prevent 50 terrorist events since 2011. In the previous hearing, he was pinned down by Senator Leahy and admitted that the program wasn't 'directly' responsible for catching any terrorist but was part of a broader group of programs that worked in 'coordination'. Basically, he offers no evidence (other than "trust us') that the billions spent on these programs have helped 'prevent' (the claimed justification for them) one crime.

Yet, no one on the Intelligence Committee challenged them on any of their statements, on CNN and other news networks the headlines blasted "NSA Programs Have Prevented 50 Terrorist Attacks". The people in the US see the headlines and do not question any further. The Eloi are contented and comfortable. The sheeple go baaaa.

Please read the following and understand the bullshit we are being fed.

Joyce lists four cases he says the NSA programs helped stop.

The first is the NYC subway bombing plot, which led to the arrest of Afghan-American Najibullah Zazi in Colorado and two accomplices in New York.

Joyce says that both 702 email records searches and 215 phone records searches were used in the Zazi case. The 702 search helped link Zazi for the first time to one of the New York suspects, he says.

The second example is Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, who pleaded guilty this year in an attempt to detonate what he believed to be a bomb in New York's financial district. 702 surveillance exposed the plot, Joyce says.

The third case is David Headley, the Pakistani-American who scouted sites in Mumbai for Lakshar e-Taibi that led to the attacks killing 168 people. The FBI received intelligence of Headley's possible involvement in the Mumbai bombings, Joyce says. He said Headley was later convicted based on evidence collected through the surveillance programs of a plot to bomb a Danish newspaper that published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Finally, Joyce says an NSA business record Fisa search led to the interdiction of an individual in the US "[with] known contact to terrorists overseas." The FBI was "able to disrupt this terrorist activity," Joyce says – no details.

If you don't understand why it is bullshit let me know and I will explain it. I've posted here on the first two before.

More bullshit. For the first few years of the program all the agencies, especially the FBI, were complaining that the CYA effort by NSA to 'share' data was actually slowing down investigations because of the mountains of raw, uncoordinated data they were forced to plow through.

In PJ Lifestyle today I discuss the Islamic nations' opposition to a UN resolution decrying violence against women:

Last Friday, Islamic member nations of the United Nations Human Rights Council rejected as un-Islamic a resolution condemning violence against women. The Kuwait News Agency reported that “the rejections include the paragraph, which gives women ‘the right to control matters concerning their sexual lives as well as their reproductive health without coercion, discrimination or violence.’"

I am awaiting a call this morning from my niece in Germany. She got the crap beaten out of her by her 'friend' another Hindu. Things are bad for women in India too, but not as bad as in the moslem lands.

Alexander then says the surveillance programs have stopped "50 potential terrorist events since 9/11." He says he will provide documents to the committee on Wednesday for "every one of those cases for your review."

Alexander says he can't make details of all 50 cases publice. "If we give all those out, we give too much out about how we're tracking down terrorists as a community. And we can't do that."

Gee, fifty. A nice round number. It will make a good sound bite. Potential? The quality of the info likely on a par with the four Joyce provided above.

Under the current regime, the US has come to be viewed as the 'patsy' nation, the tail end of FUKUS. We were disliked under Bush and we are laughed at under Obama. Each of us needs to decide which is worse.

It's made clear when the infamous 'reset' with Russia fails (both as a button and a policy) and Putin ends up keeping our ambassador waiting for three hours. If that wasn't bad enough, he also stole a superbowl ring.

We saw it with the embarrassing failed effort to get a peace conference going between the PA and Israel, Hillary's embarrassing changes in position leading up to regime chane in Egypt, in Obama being drug into Libya by the unholy troika, the same in Syria, and now, in addition to arming terrorists we will be negotiating with them.

Priceless. Some here would say it's 'all part of the plan' to which I would respond time to move on to plan B.

The current systematic destruction of the social order in the Islamic Arc, part of the program.Autocratic order, replaced by anarchy and conflict.

The target moved from the US, to the "Near Enemy" of the radical Islamoids.

Jihadis speak of the "near enemy" (apostate regimes in and around the Middle East) and the "far enemy" (the United States and the West generally). The man credited with coining these terms, Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj, did so largely to emphasize that it was much more important to attack the near enemy, a principle he upheld by organizing the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. (The Egyptian government affirmed the same principle in executing Faraj.) In 1993, a militant Egyptian group called al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya ("the Islamic Group"), which had extensive ties to al-Qaida, broke with the "near enemy" strategy and bombed the World Trade Center. In 1996, al-Qaida followed suit and formally turned its attention to the far enemy. But according to Fawaz A. Gerges, an international affairs professor at Sarah Lawrence and author of The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, other jihadist groups around the world never really bought into this shift in priorities. Even al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya had by late 1999 declared a cease-fire, a move that outraged its incarcerated spiritual leader, Omar Abdel-Rahman ("the blind sheikh") and caused the group to splinter. With the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden hoped to rally jihadis outside al-Qaida's orbit to join the battle against the far enemy. Instead, he scared them off. Al-Qaida is today the only foreign terror group we know of with a declared interest in attacking the United States. That's why discussion—including this one—about whether the United States might experience another 9/11 typically focuses solely on al-Qaida. (I explain in "The Melting-Pot Theory" why the possibility of a domestic group causing another 9/11 is considered remote.) If al-Qaida isn't focused right now on attacking the United States, then there's no reason to believe anyone is.

The US has garnered a reasonable level of success shifting the focus of the radical Islamoids to their Near Enemy and away from US.There have been no large scale terrorist attacks, in the US, since 2001.

The lack of any organized terrorist attack in the US does indicate a level of competency that is well above and beyond the boob level.

The costs of that success, they have been quite high. Those costs mostly paid by the people living in those countries designated as the "Near Enemy", by the radical Islamoids.But to deny the success that the US policy has generated, the lack of attacks in the US, should not be dismissed so lightly.

How does the US successfully disengage from the Islamic Arc, while still protecting US interests, here, there, everywhere?

What are they saying at the Imperialist Hotel, Bar & Grill?Inquiring minds really do want to know.

We have Obama for the next 3 ½ years and then the frontrunner in 2016, IMO, would be Hillary who has proven herself to be part of the problem. Unless someone comes out of the blue on the GOP side (or maybe even the Dem side if Hillary falters), probably from the state level, I would expect the same neocon influences would prevail or, at least, that their volume and talking points would be used to define the GOP.

However, the fact that there is not any effective leadership currently in view is no reason to keep shooting yourself in the foot. I once again refer you to Einstein's definition of insanity.

The lack of any organized terrorist attack in the US does indicate a level of competency that is well above and beyond the boob level.

If you are still arguing that it is US foreign policy that is responsible for the dearth of terrorist attacks we have seen in the US, I will respond. I believe that is what we were discussing.

I don’t deny that there have been few effective terrorist attacks in the U.S. but your presumption that the reason for that is U.S. foreign policy is IMO not credible. The unsuccessful attacks we've seen were the result of incompetence on the part of the terrorist, the underwear bomber, the Times Square bomber, the boobs in Fl. running around in their camo. Then there were those like the unsuccessful NY subway bomber and the successful ones like the Ft. Hood shooter and the Boston bombers. In all these cases, the terrorists involved cited U.S. foreign policy as the reason ‘for’ their plots. It's hard to comment on the myriad others that have been supposedly foiled since the details are 'secret'.

To suggest that our interventions in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria are somehow preventing attacks here in the U.S. is the neocon canard when they are not using chemical and other WMD's as their justificacation for war. On the other side of the equation, though we had 3000 deaths on 9/11, due to our foreign interventions since we have added more than double that amount of deaths and tens of thousands of US casualties many of whose lives will never be the same and that doesn’t even count the opportunity costs lost from treasure spent. Likewise, we have created a whole generation of people throughout the world who despise the U.S.

The neocons, and evidently you, fall prey to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. They assume that the lack of terrorist attacks in the US result from US foreign policy though they are unable to prove it and there are more obvious reasons for the terroists not attacking here. You ignore Occam’s Razor by ignoring the fact that there are numerous opportunities for conducting terrorist attacks in places that are a lot less risky than the US. You also ignore the fact that as time has passed most of the terrorism in the world today is conducted within the context of sectarian and nationalistic conflicts. Even the major terrorist organization out there, al Queda, has other fish to fry, Syria and Mali being the latest. You mentioned it yourself in your link above, at the moment most in the ME have bigger fish to fry than the US, not that that might not change after a while. Likewise, under the current policy the US is unwilling to put boots on the ground so, in Syria for instance, the terrorists sit there like a cargo cult waiting for presents to be dropped from the skies (or at least hoofed in by the CIA). They have learned the lesson, when your enemy is making a fool of himself, don't interrupt him.

To assume that the events transpiring in the ME today are mainly the result of U.S. foreign policy is IMO merely fanciful, jingoistic, chauvinism. Since the early years of the Bush presidency, the U.S. has been reacting not driving events in the ME.

How does the US successfully disengage from the Islamic Arc, while still protecting US interests, here, there, everywhere?

First, define for me what the current US interests in the Islamic Arc are and I can respond.

The neocons have argued that by our intervention we are spreading democracy in the ME but their presumtion going in was that the democracy would naturally result in those populations choosing liberalism and the values of the west. How is that working out? Obama says we needed to intervene in Libya for humanitarian reasons. How did that work out? Securing the oil? We are becoming less and less dependent upon ME oil anyway but to argue our actions are somehow securing the oil there is just bizarre. What we are contributing to in the ME right now is a regional conflict that could affect all the major oil producers there. Hardly stabilizing. To protect Israel? Makes sense, that is all John Kerry speaks of these days. However, how does that protect our 'national interests' given the resulting chaos in the region and the friction cause with players like Russia and China? Protecting the sea lanes? Surely, we can do that without arming a bunch of insurgents in Syria. In fact, the potential for unintended consequences are enormous.

But you tell me what are our current national interests in the ME and I will respond. And then you can explain to me how arming our enemies and embarrassing ourselves with our friends as in Kerry's flights of fantasy about a PA/Israeli peace deal will help promote those interests.

You have stated that our foreign policy involves sowing chaos among the players in the ME. I agree. However, you argue it is by intent. I argue it is because of pure incompetance.

I would be interested in knowing where you got the idea that everything that has happened in the ME over the last 12 years has happened, not strictly as the result of US actions, but also by conscious US intent when first initiating those actions.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.